French Revolution

“ The French Revolution following so soon upon the great American Revolution, shouldered the people's cause ahead more than a thousand years, and was worth every drop of blood spilled in the triumphal march of freedom! ”

“ The French Revolution, with its dramatic overthrow of tyranny and its splendid watchword, ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,’ made its own appeal to the hope as well as the imagination of the English people, although the sanguinary incidents which marked it retarded the movement for Reform in England, and as a matter of fact sent the Reformers into the wilderness for the space of forty years. ”

“ In spite of the extravagant direction given to this enthusiasm, in spite of the crimes and follies in which it lost itself, the French Revolution derives from the force, truth, and universality of the ideas which it took for its law, and from the passion with which it could inspire a multitude for these ideas, a unique and still living power ”

“ The Protestant Revolts were the first great revolutionary wave, the Puritan revolution in England was another, the formation of the American Republic and the institution of constitutional government and religious freedom another, while the French Revolution brought the rising movement to a head and swept away, in a deluge of blood, the very foundations of the mediaeval system. Along with much that was disastrous, the French Revolution accomplished after all much that was of greatest importance for human progress. ”

“ The Place Louis Quinze was soon to be the Place de la Revolution. The bronze statue was to be melted into bullets by a maddened populace, and standing on that very spot was to be the guillotine which would destroy king, queen, the king's sister, and a great part of the nobility of France.
It is said that the three great events of modern times are the Reformation, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. Events such as these have a lurid background, a long vista of causes behind them! A French Revolution is not the work of a day, nor of a single man. ”

“ INTRODUCTION. CHARACTER OF THE REVOLUTION.—The French Revolution was a tremendous upheaval of society, which brought with it the abolition of feudalism and monarchy, and the securing of an equality of political rights. Its immediate result in France was the establishment of a democratic republic, followed by an empire resting on military power. Its conquests, and the predominance of France, provoked an uprising of the other European peoples in behalf of national independence. This overthrew the French empire, and produced a temporary restoration of the old dynasty. ”

“ The first French Revolution was rather, in his opinion, one result, and in itself by no means the most important, of that far wider and greater spirit which through enquiry and doubt, through pain and triumph, sweeps mankind round the circles of its gradual development: and it is to this that we must trace the literature of modern Europe. ”

“ Notwithstanding its excesses and follies, the great French Revolution will ever have an absorbing interest for mankind, because it began as a struggle for the advancement of the cause of manhood, liberty, and equal rights. ”

“ Of the French Revolution we may say with precision and confidence that it owed primarily its peculiar character—its austere ideals and wild distortions, its illimitable aspirations and chaotic endeavors—to the extent to which the nation had become imbued with his spirit and theories. ”

“ And when the French revolution took place among a people long accustomed to lead the taste and opinions of the neighbouring nations, it seemed as a glorious light placed in the very centre of the civilized world, to dispel the last remains of Gothic darkness, and reveal to man the true principles of his social nature. ”

“ These particular men, moved by certain passions, urged by certain circumstances, with such and such designs, such intentions, acting in such an attempt with such an illusion of their own, or with such a deception, of another, who, martyrs of themselves or of others, enter on harsh contests and reciprocal suppressions of each other—there is the real history of the French Revolution. ”

“ The more deeply the French Revolution is considered, the more manifest is its preeminence above all the strange and terrible things that have come to pass on this earth. Every ancient institution and every time honored custom disappeared in a moment. ”

“ The jealousies and rivalries among the sovereigns had thrown all Europe into tumult. The French Revolution had been productive of consequences which created a flame of intense excitement, reaching the outer circumference of the Continent. Society was thrown into an agitated and perturbed condition, and the foundations of the strongest Governments were threatened. ”

“ The French Revolution may be considered as one of those manifestations of a general state of feeling among civilised mankind produced by a defect of correspondence between the knowledge existing in society and the improvement or gradual abolition of political institutions. ”

“ The most complicated and varied of these great movements is the French Revolution, on which thousands of volumes have been written, so that it is impossible even to classify the leading events and the ever-changing features of that rapid and exciting movement. The first act of that great drama was the attempt of reformers and patriots to destroy feudalism,--with its privileges and distinctions and injustices,--by unscrupulous and wild legislation, and to give a new constitution to the State. ”

“ What are the present Governments of Europe but a scene of iniquity and oppression? What is that of England? Do not its own inhabitants say it is a market where every man has his price, and where corruption is common traffic at the expense of a deluded people? No wonder, then, that the French Revolution is traduced. ”

“ The French Revolution, by the novelty of its doctrines, by the fierceness and rapidity of its action, and by that military character in it which was instinctively divined upon the part of its opponents, challenged, shortly after its inception, the armed interference of those ancient traditional governments, external to and neighbouring upon French territory, which felt themselves threatened by the rapid advance of democracy. ”

“ The result was the French Revolution, which became a triumph of all those idealogues who were determined at any cost to reconstitute society. They were radical, for they cut off the heads of the great and noble ”

“ The French Revolution did not, as a matter of fact, rest with a mere revulsion of moral forces, but as the infection descended from moral heights into the grosser elements of the national life, men soon {3} began to fight for the new life with the old weapons, until France found, and others looking on saw, the beautiful dream of liberty tightening down into that hideous nightmare, and saddest of all tyrannies, the tyranny of the multitude! ”

“ One of the three or four greatest movements in modern history, the French Revolution exercised a profound influence on English thought and literature, and we must devote a few words to its causes and progress. During the two centuries while England had been steadily winning her way to constitutional government, France had past more and more completely under the control of a cynically tyrannical despotism and a cynically corrupt and cruel feudal aristocracy. ”

“ For the sake of obviating misconstruction of my occasional remarks on political subjects, I think it right, in this introductory chapter, to make a few general observations on the French revolution. I detest, or obtest, against all revolutions, for two reasons: change of forms and names, and, generally speaking, of persons even, does not always produce a change of principles or of conduct ”

“ THE French Revolution concentrates within the narrow space of five years, from the 5th of May, 1789, to the 9th of Thermidor, 1794, all that man can conceive as most dramatic, repulsive, uplifting, terrifying, glorious, and disheartening. ”

“ The French Revolution, which coincided with its first stages, helped to break the continuity between the old order and the new, and both by its direct influence and by the vigorous reactions which it generated cleft society into conflicting elements. ”

“ The Great French Revolution, with the reaction and restoration following it, likewise the smaller revolutions which were the continuation of the Great Revolution, drew the attention of wide circles to the contrast and the conflict between the old and new régimes, and engendered the theories and experiments towards a better, and, as far as possible, permanent, organisation of states, nations, Europe and humanity ”

“ and the French revolution will be found to have had great influence on the strength of parties, and on the subsequent political transactions of the United States. ”

“ The genesis of the French Revolution, as well as its duration, was conditioned by elements of a rational, affective, mystic, and collective nature, each category of which was ruled by a different logic. ”

“ Subsequent events that can be traced to the Revolution include the Napoleonic Wars, two separate restorations of the monarchy, and two additional revolutions as modem France took shape. The ideals brought by the French Revolution for a more equal society rapidly spread along the entire Western world. ”

“ Introductory.—The French Revolution is in political what the German Reformation is in ecclesiastical history. It was the revolt of the French people against royal despotism and class privilege. "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," was the motto of the Revolution. In the name of these principles the most atrocious crimes were indeed committed; but these excesses of the Revolution are not to be confounded with its true spirit and' aims. The French people in 1789 contended for those same principles that the English Puritans defended in 1640, and that our fathers maintained in 1776. ”

“ We have here a pretty fair account of the origin and genealogy of the opinions of the French Revolution, which opinions of liberty, truth, and justice, neither the French Revolution shall destroy, nor those who destroyed it, because it was produced by and gave birth to those opinions ”

“ On the map thus divided let us 'think through' the history of the last four generations; it will assume a new coherency.
The English Revolution limited the powers of Monarchy, and the French Revolution asserted the rights of the People. ”

“ See, in France, all intellectual vigor dying under the tyranny of the Seventeenth Century to revive in splendor as Liberty awoke in the Eighteenth, and on the enfranchisement of French peasants in the Great Revolution, basing the wonderful strength that has in our time defied defeat. ”

“ The French Revolution was an organized attempt to overturn the foundations of society and hasten progress by moving the hands of the clock forward a few centuries,—the net result was a despotism the like of which the world has not known since the days of Rome. ”